Google Season of Docs’21 first month evaluation
Post Summary
It has been one month since the start of the Google Season of Docs’21 program, and so far 11 technical writers working on 6 projects have shown great progress, they raised 48 PRs combined and the projects are going more or less as planned.
Also, we had 3 meetings in this phase to discuss aspects related to the GSoD’21 project.
You can learn more from our meeting notes.
This post gives an overview of the performance of tech writers so far
Tutorials for users of Wechaty team
Shweta Soni’s documentation quality is good, she had a bit of trouble in one of her PR, but she rectified that with the help of volunteers. Her performance and PR quality are improving each time. She responds to the feedback given and is always ready to accept enhancements in her PRs.
Souvik Biswas has been contributing for a month before the start of the program so he is well aware of Wechaty ecosystem, and how to run bots. He has been really hard working and is paying great details to the documentation and in general, his documentation is good, his one documentation was a bit verbose.
Overall as the main documentation for Wechaty, they really did a great job as the leading role and could definitely represent Wechaty documentation.
Introduction and Explanation team
The experience of Chris and Joseph is visible in the documentation that they have pushed for review. Their documentation quality is excellent, volunteers don’t know who has written which parts, but they have ensured that there is a fair division of work between Chris and Joseph. Apart from excellent documentation their PRs are easy to review and the team has a very good knowledge of git and they get out most of the GitHub. They both have been very punctual in the meetings, and have shown great sincerity and professionalism in their work. Also, they have delivered everything on time and were slightly ahead of the timeline. They both proactively interact in the meetings. They have mostly delivered their deliverables so that’s great as well.
Chris is very proactive and responsible for her job, the topics she documented are quite new to her, but she contacted Simin often to discuss how to do it better.
Joseph’s documentation is always great and on time.
Introduction and Explanation follow-ups
Reference Section team
Shraddha is on time with her deliverables, and her documentation content is accurate as well, but, she makes a lot of typos and grammatical errors, which should be improved. She has been proactive in the community in terms of reviewing PRs of other writers and introducing new useful labels. She missed a meeting but that’s acceptable for her as her project has a diluted timeline of 17 weeks. She is doing good in general and has been active in the meeting that she had attended. She raises clean PRs which are easy to review.
Soumi Bardhan has completed her deliverable ahead of time, but she raised quite a big PR, our suggestion to her is to raise atomic PRs like her teammate. Her documentation quality is good. She has also attended all the meetings so far.
The reference team is rather new to documentation, but they are very responsive and learn quickly. Their documentation quality is getting better now, just still need to pay attention to minor typos.
Reconstruct Landing Page with Value Propositions team
The team is going according to the timeline. There has been some delay but that wasn’t their fault. They have completed the value propositions of Wechaty by listing it out and they have made a perfect slogan for the Wechaty new landing page and also a great design with attractive CTAs, delivering Unique Selling Point (USP) to the Wechaty users in the new landing page and many more. They have completed the full prototype of the new landing page with value propositions as per their timeline. Apart from the new landing page project, they are also working on the introduction video team for the Wechaty community and they are syncing it and making sure that the introduction video and the new landing page are delivering the same value propositions and other things in common for the users.
Sajen is very sincere and proactive. He is working really hard and has been active in the weekly meetings. Arnab is a bit shy and has missed one meeting, volunteers am looking forward to hearing from him in future meetings.
Improve the gRPC and OpenAPI ecosystem team
His project is a bit intricate for volunteers to review, so PRs are yet to be reviewed. His projects involve both documentation and coding, probably he has churned more code than documentation. Considering that he is working alone on his project he is actually working very hard. He is doing extra work apart from his timeline that is appreciable. The concern is that he isn’t strictly following his timeline, and we would like him to suggest first deliver deliverables according to the timeline then work on other PRs.
How-to Guides team
How to guide team is very meticulous, they are very hardworking and sincere about their work. Also, they take feedback very seriously and try to implement the given changes as soon as possible. They did some mistakes in git commit, but they admitted that they made a mistake and have rectified the errors. They have learnt a lot about Git in this process as well. Their documentation is clear and to the point which is good. They have shown good determination since the start of the program. They have attended all the meeting so far, and they also take part in conversations. It’s good that Vasvi raises concerns about her team in meetings and on emails.
The how-to guide’s team might not be the most professional in documenting, but they are very organized. We really appreciate that they have set a clear timeline and strictly follow it. For project management, it is best to have teammates like them that report their work to us actively and clearly.
Suggestions for the upcoming months
Almost every tech writer feels that PRs need to be reviewed faster, so that is one of the areas that we should improve upon in the upcoming months. It’s also holding back the progress of few teams.
Special thanks to Simin for adding her evaluations in this post and maintaining the Wechaty follow-ups sheet for tracking timelines of tech writers.
基于Nodejs+Wechaty开发微信机器人管理平台